Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Piece on French Armenian Genocide Denial Bill in Beirut Daily Star

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Piece on French Armenian Genocide Denial Bill in Beirut Daily Star

    Talking turkey about Armenian history
    By Christopher Atamian

    http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?e dition_ID=10&article_ID=76503&categ_id=5

    Tuesday, October 31, 2006

    Few issues in recent memory have incited as much fervor, debate,
    applause and concomitant outrage as the recent bill passed by the
    French Lower House, which proposes making denial of the Armenian
    genocide punishable by law. Not surprisingly, Armenians around the
    world have supported the initiative almost unconditionally, while
    most Turks have opposed it on historical grounds - i.e. they still
    refuse to label the massacres of 1915-1923 as genocide. A few Turkish
    scholars accept the genocide label, but along with many in the West,
    oppose the bill as an encroachment on free speech. Should the bill
    pass and become law - an unlikely event given political realities
    such as Turkey's EU bid - it would mirror the existing Loi Gayssot,
    which criminalizes the public denial of the Jewish Holocaust.

    Ordinarily, the right to free speech should be protected with only
    limited constraints and exceptions. For example, if an American citizen
    wants to insult the United States, it is his or her right to do so,
    as it is his or her right to desecrate the American flag. The first
    amendment is clear on these and other issues of free expression. In
    certain instances, however - for example, when national security
    is endangered - it is acceptable for the state, after the proper
    consultations and votes, to step in to (hopefully momentarily) curtail
    certain rights. The fact that George W. Bush has now shamelessly
    abused this right on more than one occasion should not mean that
    the French government should not, conversely, use its full powers to
    protect its Armenian citizens from continued insults and affronts -
    by Turks or anyone else. Similarly, the French state ought to protect
    its Turkish citizens from anti-Turkish or anti-Muslim attacks as well.

    The French bill, as already mentioned, follows legal precedent,
    namely the existing Loi Gayssot. Le Monde and other publications have
    claimed that the two laws are different because the latter essentially
    serves as a bulwark against existing and future anti-semitism. Yet the
    Armenian genocide law, nay-sayers to the contrary, would function in
    exactly the same way, given the existing racism and discrimination
    against Armenians in France. Armenian genocide monuments in the
    country have recently been desecrated, while Armenians have been
    subject to all sorts of vile abuse - physical and otherwise -
    including violent attacks by French Turks at a recent Armenian
    genocide commemoration. The question then becomes: Do Armenian
    citizens of France (and other countries who have passed similar
    anti-Holocaust denial laws) not deserve the same protections as their
    Jewish compatriots? Is the suffering of one people to be placed above
    that of another? When push comes to shove, what applies to one group
    should also apply to the other. Furthermore, the French quite rightly
    consider historic memory to be a basic human right, and thus denial of
    historic events that incite or abet racism a violation of that right.

    The positive human rights reforms that have occurred within Turkey
    in recent years (discussion of the Armenian genocide in newspapers
    and certain intellectual circles, the opening of a Kurdish-language
    television station etc.) have been cosmetic at best: anti-semitism and
    anti-Armenianism are in fact rampant in the land of the Moon and Stars,
    and Islamic fundamentalism on the rise. And although Elif Shafak, the
    noted Turkish novelist, and Armenian journalist Hrant Dink have been
    acquitted of charges of "insulting Turkishness" under the nefarious
    Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code, they have both been harassed
    to a degree beyond the norms of any civilized country. Dink has now
    been accused five times by the Turkish state, each time under the
    same ludicrous law that smacks of the worst in state fascism. His
    life has been threatened and he has become persona non grata almost
    everywhere he goes - within Turkey where nationalists want his head,
    as well as within the Armenian diaspora, where he is alternately
    seen as an accommodationist or a traitor for his views on the issue
    at hand and the Armenian genocide in general.

    http://www.dailystar.com.lb

    The problem, then, is not just that Turks deny the Armenian genocide
    within Turkey, but that they have exported this denial to European
    countries. To deny the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians, as well
    as another 1.5 million Christian Pontic Greeks and Assyrians, is
    malevolent and in and of itself a denial of Armenians' basic human
    dignity. France has every right to tell Turks: "You can spew your
    venom in Turkey, but leave your denialism at home." The degree to
    which France acknowledges its own colonialist past in Algeria is
    beside the point, although one would hope that it does so as well.

    Turkey has threatened to "retaliate" against the French by passing
    laws about the "Algerian genocide," further polluting the historical
    debate. Algeria may have been many things - colonialist, insulting,
    invasive - and French dominion there may in fact have visited
    wide-scale killings on a foreign population of differing religion and
    language, but genocide it was not, according to accepted definitions.

    Armenians endured the loss of lands, property and self-respect during
    the Armenian genocide. From 1915 to 1923, they watched their men
    slaughtered outright, and their children and women raped, tortured
    and sent to their deaths in the most inhumane ways, including the
    torching of sulfur caves and churches, where practitioners seeking
    refuge were burned alive. Mass drownings in the Black Sea, hangings
    and crucifixions were commonplace. Billions of dollars of goods,
    property and lands were expropriated.

    Unlike the Germans vis-Ë~F-vis the Jews, the Turks have not only
    failed to apologize or compensate Armenians, but they continue
    their vile campaign of denial, which they now export all over the
    globe. As Elie Wiesel has accurately pointed out, denial is the last
    stage of genocide and a symbolic re-enactment of the crime itself. In
    this case, the French have said: Enough! You cannot kill the victims
    again, at least not within our borders. It is disingenuous to suggest
    that because of a French law, Turks will now have an added excuse to
    continue what they have been doing for 90 years - i.e. finishing off
    the complete annihilation of its native Christian populations. The
    correct response from Turks should be shame and an acknowledgment that
    yes indeed, these sad events took place, rather than the bombastic
    nationalism that has kept the country on the margins of the civilized
    world for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries.

    As Jacques Chirac rather pompously declared in his recent speech in
    Yerevan: Vive la France! Vive L'ArmŽnie!

    Christopher Atamian is a New York-based writer and journalist of
    Lebanese origin who writes frequently on culture and politics for
    the The New York Times, Gourmet, New York Press and more. He wrote
    this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

    --Boundary_(ID_wFQx3yp3Ds9Hd9+vHRbvDQ)--
Working...
X